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Older Bypass Method Is Best, a Study Shows

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

For decades, bypass surgery, in which surgeons improve blood flow to the heart by sewing new blood vessels to get around blocked ones, was done the same way. The heart was stopped while blood was pumped through a heart-lung machine to do the heart's work.

But doctors increasingly worried that the machine, the "pump," might sometimes lead to strokes or memory problems or personality changes. Some privately called patients with those difficulties "pumpheads."

And so, in the last seven years, many surgeons began offering and patients increasingly demanded an alternative: off-pump surgery in which the machine was not used and doctors operated on a still-beating heart.